Last week, I messaged someone very important to me, “But don’t you want to see me?”
I did not get a response.
The whole gamut of thoughts ran through my head at different times:
Well, they’re probably busy.
Maybe they forgot.
They don’t like me.
They don’t have capacity for me, and that hurts.
They don’t have capacity for me, and that’s understandable.
They couldn’t have said even one word?
How little capacity do you need to have to completely ignore the shit out of me?
What have I done so wrong for them to not want to talk to me?
Maybe they still love me a lot and don’t know how to express that to me in a way that makes sense right now.
Do I still love them?
I am tired of loving them.
I am making this mean way more than it needs to.
It just means I care. But damn, if it isn’t annoying.
All these thoughts can be distilled to something like this: this person is a big part of my world, and if they don’t relate to me, I don’t feel like I belong in this world.
What a natural, human thing that we all experience.
I remember in law school learning about actual eviction vs. constructive eviction. Actual eviction is when the landlord directly tells the tenant to get out. Constructive eviction is making the space so uninhabitable that the tenant has no choice but to move out even if the landlord never told them directly to get out of the space.
Whether we are rejected directly or indirectly, the effect is the same: we are kicked out of the space that we thought was habitable and safe.
When we feel rejected by those that used to feel familiar and close, we no longer feel like there is a place we can really belong. It may feel like losing a home.
Of course, our bodies may certainly try to enter into some sort of protective mode - whether it’s freezing or dissociating or fighting - whatever that looks like for you.
But when our bodies react the way they do, we typically feel instant shame because we are not “supposed” to react the way we do. Why? Because we never talk about it, and even when we do, self-improvement “gurus” try to get you out of that state asap. So, all around, however our bodies react to rejection feels like it’s abnormal, so immediately it feels like an awful thing to do.
Which then leads us to ignore our bodies and try to “just get over it” and then shame ourselves some more by saying how stupid this whole thing is.
Oh yes, this is a daily occurrence for me. Because all of the above - including my bodily reaction and the shame and whatever other thought or feeling I experience - is the most human experience that has been pathologized into oblivion.
The question is never about how to “get rid” of our feelings. That’s like asking how we can escape our humanity, and that begs the question, why be human at all?
Instead, the question is, how do we experience those feelings? Kind of like how do we read and write because that is something that allows us to move through the world with the brain and bodies we have been born with.
First, here’s the good news. However you are experiencing rejection is actually an excellent way to experience rejection because that simply reflects the truth of your experience. The truth of our experience is a sacred part of our humanity because that is the purest proof of our existence. It is the reflection of our heartbeat - no matter how irregular it may feel. It is evidence of our aliveness.
Anything less than or different from it is a lie. Something that does not belong to us.
So if there is nothing to fix, the only thing left to do is to inquire, explore, and be curious about it so that we can know more corners of ourselves. Our personhood is kind of like the universe: there is always more to find. Especially if we have been shucked away from our truth by constantly trying to hide our real feelings and what they are trying to tell us.
So here are some questions I invite you to consider as you traverse the unknown and mysterious parts of yourself:
In the face of rejection, which part(s) of me feel like it has been robbed of its home? Is it my sense of agency? Creativity? Intelligence?
If I were to redefine the thing that has been robbed from me, how is it true that I am actually the greatest embodiment of that very thing? For example, if I am an artist who feels like my art is not being sold at the level I want it to sell, and I feel like my creativity has been robbed from me as a result, how does this “rejection” mean that I am actually embodying my creativity even more?
Where am I requiring someone else to take responsibility for how I take ownership of my own agency, creativity, intelligence, etc.?
Where am I requiring myself to feel a certain way and be a certain way to “prove” that I am “more mature than this”?
Am I available to offer myself more permission to feel uncertain and confused about who I am and how I feel as a way to stop requiring myself to arrive at an answer “as soon as possible”?
If there were no right or wrong answer, what does it mean to experience rejection at the pace of my own body?
Where can I allow myself to desire what I desire - whether that’s validation, attention, or celebration? And when I do, where are the resources that can offer me those things that I desire?
Which parts of me remain hidden that actually want to be seen, and where can I request that I be seen in that particular way?
What does it look like to have my own back in the experience of rejection? Does it mean being alone or finding acceptance elsewhere or something else?
Am I willing to feel shitty, embarrassed, and uncomfortable if it means that I get to know more of myself before I turn into a cold, dead body?
Some of these questions may feel triggering or confusing. Again, that is very human of you and me. Sometimes we speak different languages and are available for different things, which means these questions are here as a resource if and only if you want to take them with you.
The reality is that the world is not a safe place. We may feel so exhausted in the face of constant rejection. We may not even have capacity to ask these questions.
If that is where you are, what do you have capacity for, if at all? What if that was the only thing that is important right now?
The reason we feel at home in our own homes is that it is a place that we can go back to. It is ours, and it is familiar. We know where the bathroom is, and we know where our favorite hot sauce is in the fridge. We are the only ones with the keys to it. The one place where we can feel relatively safe from outside interruption, more so than other places on the planet.
So finding home in our own bodies happens more deeply the more we become familiar with the parts of us that have been hidden over the years.
I invite you to know those parts of you. I invite you to prioritize that above the need to be understood by others.
It is so much work for us to understand even our own selves. It would be even more work to try to get other to do that work on our behalf.
They will never understand at the level we want them to understand, nor do we have control over it. The most exciting task we are left with, then, is to understand ourselves a tiny bit more, one at a time, at the pace of our own body.
As we continue to know ourselves more, no one can take that knowing away from us.
May we find more belonging in our own bodies so that we don’t need to require so much from the world to give us that belonging.
The work is not meant to be easy. We will often feel alone. But I won’t dare to tell you “you are not alone” if “alone” is the truth of how you feel.
But I will invite you to be alone with me. We can be alone together, and we are a force.
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If this is the first time you’re reading my work, welcome. If you found a little bit more of belonging in your own body reading my work, you can find more of me here: angela-han.com. See you around.